Ruud

Beautiful images, Wouter. In the close-ups, especially Mare Nectaris, the enhanced colours are very becoming! Great work!

Thank you, Reeny, for sharing your impressions. New prospective binoviewer buyers will benefit from them.

Ha! I have that too, but checked on google and saw the price, so decided not to mention it. It's very good, but not hundreds to a thousand dollars good!

I forgot to mention, if you can't find the Times Atlas of the Moon you can still enjoy its artful maps here: https://www.lpi.usra.edu/resources/mapcatalog/LAC/ I downloaded all the charts and reduced them to 50% and bundled them into a pdf. The charts are free to download. They are in jp2 format (jpeg 2000). Irfanview can't open them without a plugin, but Gimp, Photoshop etcetera can. I converted one of the maps to .jpg so that you can have a look. Try it at full size.

I just love the Times Atlas of the Moon. It's out of print, but there are still copies around. Also have a look here: https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/4442 Set date and hour, click on the preview and see what you got in your download folder. And this is nice too: Quickmap (sometimes a bit slow)

3D vision depends on parallax difference between the images the eyes take in. Astronomical objects, even the nearby Moon, have a minute parallax. Way too small for the eyes to make use of. Anyway, a binoviewer just splits one image into two identical ones. Both eyes view the same scene from the same angle and the binoviewer imparts no 3D information to the observer. If any 3D perception occurs, it does so in the imagination of the beholder. Now, if you have a set of eyepieces where one has a group of small prisms in the light path that shift parts of the image, you get a kind of artificial 3D effect in your binoviewer. It's a real effect, but not real 3D and really no more than a gimmick. Anyway, I imagine that with your lack of stereo perception even artificial 3D is going to be of no use. Finally, you can simulate the 3D effect of a binoviewer (one that uses normal eyepieces) by means of this naked eye method: look up at the night sky with both eyes open, cover one, look again with both. See any difference in 3D?

Once these new techniques are fully developed they will show live views of electronically captured images in user selectable bands from UV-b to near infrared that can (if the visual observer wants to) be stored as stills or video and shared. We'd better prepare for more abbreviations. I suggest we name them SBWREEVTs. That will impress people.

A wonderful image and very complete!

I'm buying a 70mm with a 2+1+1 design. Good for photography, excellent for birding I think. Robtics_robtics_70_mm_f5_4_element_flatfield_astrograph_quadruplet_nl.pdf

The knob is probably to prevent focus creep, but everyone else already said that. I have a question: I've been looking at this telescope. I thought I'd buy it for birding and as a super portable visual scope, as well as a bit of photography. Do you think this telescope would be a good choice for that?

A decade or so back, we had a year with many more good nights than I was used to. It felt like I could take out the telescope every night. There was a great increase in my observing, but after a few weeks I began to get bored! Too blase to bother. No chance of that happening these days in which sessions are so few and far between. I now feel I've invested in a hobby that can never wear out. Impossible at this rate!

for charts I use Cartes du Ciel (Sky Chart). It gives great liberty: you include on the chart whatever you want. I Print them as B&W pdf files, which I take out in my e-reader. A few examples: Pleiades.pdf with 8.1° circle for my 8x42 binos M31etc.pdf a wider view CBr-bino.pdf Corona Borealis The website is here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/skychart/

Yes, a finder eyepiece with an incredibly small fov. I think Vixen's logic is in the calendar. It's the right day for a joke.